I' ve been in the process of switching my booklog over to Movable Type, and I'm stuck on importing all my old comments. MT has an import feature that will handle comments, but the comments need to be reformatted and matched up to their associated posts first, which is where the need for a script comes in.
Here's my understanding of what's needed:
- Importing comments to existing Movable Type posts is done by looking up the date and time of the post they are associated with.
- Blogger posts have both a date and time and a post ID.
- My comments file has the Blogger post ID, but not the post's date and time.
Therefore, judging by the example of a script written to import comments from dotcomments, a similar system, what's needed is a script that will:
- Take a specially-formatted export of Blogger posts;
- Match up post IDs between posts and the comment file; and
- Write an output file of comments that
- includes the post's date and time; and
- formats the file in Movable Type's import format.
My comments file is organized in the following way:
blogger ID | yyyy-mm-dd | hh:mm am | name | email | website | comment
Each line is a new comment. Some of the times have a space between the minutes and the am/pm designation, some do not, because of changes to the commentung system. I can probably massage the data file to make this consistent in whichever direction someone would like. (I'll already be taking out some extraneous fields used for the original comment script.)
I can't just reformat my comments file to fit the dotcomments format, because the dotcomments format uses Unix timestamps. Someone else who knows PHP could probably easily modify the dotcomments script, however, or whip up their own. My guess is that this is not a difficult problem if you know a scripting language; it's just that I don't.
I can run Perl, PHP, and CGI scripts.
If anyone's interested, I'm willing to provide reasonable compensation for their time. Contact me and we'll talk about it.